ad genius instead of
common-sense. If he had grown to be the least like Mr. LOUIS NAPOLEON
PARKER'S _Disraeli_, if he had taken to standing over Governors of the
Bank of England and forcing them to sign documents under threat of
smashing up their silly old bank, if he had been such a judge of men as
to have made that prize ass, _Lord Deeford_, his secretary, or conducted
his _menage_ at Downing Street in the highly diverting manner exhibited
in Mr. PARKER's second Act, one trembles to think what they would have
called him--and done to him. And whether, if the Bank had ever had such
a Governor as _Sir Michael Probert_, England would have ever been in a
position to buy a single share in the Suez Canal or any other venture,
is a question for the curious to consider.

No wonder the Americans enjoyed _Disraeli_! REINHARDT should pirate it
for Berlin, as it would lend some colour to the imaginative Dr.
HELLFERICH's airy dissertations on English finance. Can it be that our
author is a hyphenated patriot in disguise and that this is merely a
ramification of the so thorough German Press Bureau's activities? Perish
the thought!

At the opening of the play, with _Mr. Disraeli_ and his wife as guests
at Glastonbury Towers, all went well. The almost uncanny lifelikeness of
Mr. DENNIS EADIE's make-up, the steady flow of the great man's good
things, which had been discerningly culled and quite skilfully put
together, his swift parries and kindly thrusts, his charming tenderness
towards that best of wives, the shining heroine of the crushed thumb,
all this was admirable, was eminently believable--that is if you except
the exaggerated futility and insolence of the aristocratic background.
It was when the adventuress got going; when casements began to be
mysteriously unlocked by fair hands, and pretty ears applied to
key-holes at vital moments of quite improbable disclosures to more than
improbable young men; when important despatches and secret codes began
to be left about in conspicuous places, in rooms conveniently vacated
for notoriously suspect plotters; when the Prime Minister began to
bounce and prance and to lay booby traps, into which not his enemies but
his incomparable secretary promptly blundered--it was then that things
went crooked.

It is perhaps not to be regretted. Nothing is more diverting to the
perceptive playgoer than these little dramatic-simplicities; as when,
the great Suez deal having been completed--a fact th